fishwax
fishwax's JournalI tuned into LiveNow from Fox a bit for the post-speech coverage, and they sound pretty shook
On edit: I guess i flipped to Fox's "LiveNow" channel rather than the regular FNC, which had tfg so shook up that he was mashing the buttons on the phone during his (rather low energy 
) response to Kamala Harris FOR THE PEOPLE: https://democraticunderground.com/100219372253
Both the reporter on the scene and the anchor are speaking frankly about how enthusiastic the crowd was, how impressive the production was, how the candidate's speech was "more concise" than trump's, but also substantive. It was like they were casting about for a way to be critical and dismissive, but couldn't find one.
They've got political analysts coming up soon, and I'm sure they'll get their feet back under them and be back to the usual BS, but tonight's programming and closing speech were SEISMIC, folks. 
New Audio Reveals J.D. Vance's Deep Hatred for Trump
A nice selection of some of the times Vance attacked Trump back before he became desperate to be trump's lapdog: https://newrepublic.com/post/183892/audio-jd-vance-hated-trump
In two 2016 audios uncovered by CNN’s Andy Kaczynski, Vance appeared on a podcast to promote his book The Hillbilly Elegy and argued that Trump is a fraud who preyed on white voters’ fears to achieve victory.
freestar
“I don’t think he actually cares about folks,” said Vance on The Matt Jones Podcast in August 2016. “I think I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place,” he told NPR that same month.
amidst the calls for toning down the rhetoric, what about a campaign ad with a supercut of all the times Trump
has dehumanized his opponents; mocked violence or its victims; or casually, flippantly, or deliberately alluded to violence as a viable alternative to our established legal/political institutions and processes. There is no shortage of such efforts on his part. It would be nice to contrast such calls for tolerance as we've heard from bipartisan sources with the reality of the rhetoric that Trump has always relied on in his rise to power.
Trump is not responsible for the shooting, but no mainstream American political figure has done more this century to raise the temperature or cheapen the discourse than he has. Any serious effort to emphasize the civility in civil discourse has to reject that sort of political leadership as we move forward.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Donald Trump and the Dark Magic of Violent Political Rhetoric
Just some thoughts I wanted to work through tonight, as I've been processing the events of the past couple of days; these thoughts are a function of trying to both practice with a lower rhetorical temperature while still maintaining a clear-eyed analysis of the very different roles that the two parties and their various figures have played in escalating that rhetoric over the years ...The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a poem written by Goethe but made more famous through an animated Mickey Mouse sequence from Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia, involves an apprentice who summons powerful magic with disastrous results. It’s a function of pride and laziness: though he has not yet mastered the craft of magic, he feels he can charm a broom to complete the difficult work of hauling water by the pail. At first Mickey is happy with his work, because the broom’s labor gives him rest and brings more water than he could ever have hauled on his own. But it also gives him delusions of grandeur. He keeps casting spells, until eventually he and his quarters are overrun with water, while the broom labors on and Mickey is powerless to stop it. I’ve been thinking about the story a lot in the 30+ hours since a twenty-year-old opened fire at a Trump campaign rally. The shooter took the life of one audience member, injured a couple of others, and left the sorcerer’s apprentice bleeding from his ear.
Donald Trump did not invent political violence, nor introduce extreme political rhetoric to the American system. It had been simmering for years before Trump entered as a legitimate player on the national political scene, with his campaign to de-legitimize Barack Obama’s presidency by spreading false information about Obama’s birth certificate. But while he didn’t invent it, he was more willing to use it as a tool than any other candidate before him. It was his willingness to lean into the brewing anger—to encourage it, to invite it into the mainstream, and to legitimize its more radical elements—that set him apart from other republicans. The previous two GOP presidential candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, tried to harness the energy of the tea party while still maintaining control of the party’s platform and direction. Trump’s approach, instead, was to generate as much of that dark energy as possible: by stoking the already-politicized anger on the fringe while politicizing anger anywhere else he could find it. That was the magic spell. That was the shortcut to power, and around the difficult work of mastering any practical political craft. And so Trump offered and/or encouraged one incantation after another: “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” “Make America Great Again.” “Lock her up.” And a whole host of brooms started hauling that water.
And for years, that tide has been rising. As Project 2025 began making waves in the national news, the head of the group behind it, the Heritage Foundation, claimed that we were in the midst of a new American revolution that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The GOP candidate for North Carolina governor, who has a long history of attacks on LGBT communities and anti-semitism, declared at a rally (in a church, no less) that “some folks need killing.” Trump used social media to amplify fringe calls for charges of treason against Liz Cheney and the imprisonment of various democratic elected officials. These are just a few examples, and from just the weeks immediately before the assassination attempt. But that water has been rising for years now.
Small wonder, then, that Democratic officials, who have been calling attention to this rising tide for years, were univocal in their condemnation of political violence in the wake of the shooting. Republican officials, too, condemned political violence, but they were not as univocal, and several condemned Joe Biden in the same breath. J.D. Vance, for instance, rumored to be on the shortlist for Trump’s VP spot, said the Biden Campaign’s rhetoric “led directly” to the assassination attempt. (This was, of course, before the shooter was revealed to be a registered republican.) Representative Mike Collins of Georgia tweeted that Biden should be immediately charged with “inciting an assassination.” Online, there were, predictably, folks on both sides of the spectrum who were pulled into conspiracy mongering and harsh rhetoric. But it is a clear and crucial difference that only one party had elected officials who were using this moment in time to amplify that sort of rhetoric. The rising tide that has normalized political rhetoric once seen as fringe and extreme is, for officials such as these, simply the water in which they swim. Trump, for his part, has thus far not framed the incident in these terms. But while the apprentice recovers from his wound and from the shock, the brooms continue in their work, because this sort of magic can never really be controlled.
In Fantasia, as in Goethe’s poem, the humbled apprentice realizes the error of his ways, and the sorcerer returns to save the day. We aren’t likely to see such a tidy resolution for this present darkness. Leaders on both sides of the aisle call on the nation to “lower the temperature” of our political rhetoric, and perhaps Trump will amplify that perspective, but I find little in his history to suggest that Trump will be reflective about the heat that his own rhetoric has propagated. I suppose time will tell. Still, either way, humans, unlike Mickey's broom, have some measure of agency, and so whatever role he played in raising the rhetorical temperature, Trump is not responsible for the actions of the shooter. Further, whatever lessons Trump may or may not draw from this incident, most would agree that, just as Mickey Mouse wouldn't deserve death at the end of Fantasia, Trump didn’t deserve to be shot in Pennsylvania on Saturday.
Meanwhile: There is no master sorcerer waiting in the wings with a counter-spell. No single person can sweep in and save us from this. We, as a people, will have to solve this ourselves. I don’t entirely know what that solution looks like, but I am pretty confident in this: if the electorate really cares about lowering the temperature, then we ought not turn around and put the sorcerer's apprentice back in power.
Thoughts on The Bad News Bears on this Fourth of July
On Monday I watched the original version of The Bad News Bears, from 1976, with my eleven-year-old son. He liked the movie, because it’s about baseball and there are some good laughs and you have fun cheering for the underdog and you wind up feeling good even though (as with the original Rocky, which came out a few months later) the underdog doesn’t actually win in the end.
But while he liked the movie, he was not impressed with the 1970s: he commented on the cavalier attitude towards things like smoking in the dugout and drunk driving; the way that everybody just sort of shrugs it off when the hyper-competitive, poor-sport opposing coach just smacks his son in the face and knocks him down right on the pitcher’s mound in the final inning, and the various forms of casual bigotry displayed not only by the film’s villains but by kids on the team we’re rooting for.
“It was a good movie,” he said at the end. “But what was up with the ‘70s?”
I just said: “I mean, it was the 1970s. There were a lot of things that we didn’t know and a lot of things we were still figuring out. We were trying to learn and improve, and sometimes that process looks messy from the other side. But it’s worth it.”
And I don’t know how satisfied he was with the answer, but I’ve been thinking about the conversation over the last couple of days, because the subtext of the movie is that the reason all these kids are on the same team is that in previous years the league wouldn’t even let them join, and one of the dads (a city councilman, who like every other adult in the film, is deeply flawed as well) had to sue the league to guarantee that every kid had the right to play, and then all those rejects wound up on the Bad News Bears (sponsored by Chico’s Bail Bonds, lol). Because, yes, the process of self-reflection and improvement is messy, but worth it—individually and culturally. (It’s the best path to making America great.)
So Happy Birthday, America!
And please don’t give up on the process.
In the immortal words of the Ghost of Christmas Past: Go back to Jersey, ya moron!
?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C154%2C2324%2C1162&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop
(Just kidding, of course. I think I can safely speak for jersey in saying we don't need ya here, doc.)
Here's why I feel confident about Pennsylvania
Just heard on CNN that there are 800,000 votes still left in PA, and Biden has to win about 60-62% of them in order to win the state. That sounds like a lot, but Biden is going to easily outpace that 60-62%.
It appears that Pennsylvania Democrats, more than any other swing state, took advantage of vote by mail. And ALL the ballots that are left are vote by mail. It happens that a huge chunk of them are in counties that should favor Biden, which is encouraging. But here's the thing: it doesn't matter what county in Pennsylvania the ballots come from--they're going to favor Biden heavily either way.
The New York Times has a list of counties with their vote totals and the estimated percentage of votes returned:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-pennsylvania.html
There is a consistent pattern in each and every single one of the counties where the vote is >98 in: Trump's margin did not increase in ANY of those counties by more than a couple of points. In Snyder County, for instance, he was +46.8 in 2016 and +47 this year. So he gained a very little. In a few of them he lost a bit. His biggest improvement was in Elk County, which went from +42.4 to +45. But that was only one of a handful of counties where he moved the needle on his margin more than two points. So it looks like, when it comes to improving his share of the vote in a given county, 3 points is probably his ceiling.
In most of those counties he improved his raw vote total, but Biden also improved over HRC's raw vote total. Look at Washington County, for instance, which is the largest county that Trump won. Trump got 61,386 in 2016 and increased that to 71,072 this year. But Biden also eclipsed HRC's 36,822 votes, winning 44,231. Biden came within a few points of matching or else exceeded Trump's increased turnout in every single county that has been completely counted.
Now look at the counties that still have votes outstanding. Some of them are huge Trump counties, like Cumberland, which Trump won by 17.8 points in 2016. Trump pulled 69k in 2016, but only 67k so far this year. So there are probably at least 2k votes for him in the uncounted mail-in ballots. But look at the democratic votes: HRC pulled 47k in 2016 and Biden only has 40k so far. So it seems likely that, even in this solidly Trump county, Biden is going to gain between 3k and 5k votes on Trump when the mail-in ballots are counted. In some of those counties, Trump is running 10, 15, even 20-25 points ahead of his 2016 margins. Which means they almost certainly have big margins of uncounted Biden votes remaining.
And those are the heavily Trump counties. When you figure that most of the remaining votes are in counties that Clinton won in 2016 (like Philadelphia, Allegheny, and Bucks most notably), things look even better. And so far, among all the counties that have counted all their votes, Biden has EXTENDED Clinton's margin in every county that she won in 2016. So the break there will be even bigger for Biden.
Biden is going to win Pennsylvania. Likely by a larger margin than the 44,000 trump won by in 2016. Maybe even by somewhere near or upwards of 100k.
The Wire's Bunny Colvin helps explain how we got here: "This drug thing, this ain't police work"
Bunny Colvin's speech--one of the best moments in the five great seasons of The Wire--has been running through my head the last couple of days, watching things flare up in Ferguson. There has been much discussion of the militarization of the police and what brought it about, and certainly the war on drugs (a war which has always been waged disproportionately against communities of color) is a major factor.
The clip
"When cops declare open season on journalists ..."
"When cops declare open season on journalists, when they feel free to declare any scene of "unlawful protest" a free fire zone, that will be a very ugly day - and not just for journalists."
---Hunter S. Thompson, "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan"
Of course, things were very ugly in Ferguson long before they started arresting journalists. But that quote comes to mind tonight, as the situation in Ferguson continues to 
("Strange Rumblings in Aztlan" is an article he wrote for Rolling Stone about the death of journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed by a wall-piercing tear gas canister fired by a deputy of the LA County Sheriff's Department during the Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War.)
Profile Information
Member since: 2001Number of posts: 29,291